| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Rezanov by Gertrude Atherton: oasis in the great winter desert of Siberia. Reza-
nov, his face turned to the window, could see the
red banks on the opposite side of the river. The
sun transformed the gilded cupolas and crosses into
dazzling points of light, and the sky above the spires
and towers, the stately square and narrow dirty
streets of the bustling little capital, was as blue and
unflecked as that which arched so high above a land
where Castilian roses grew, and one woman among
a gay and thoughtless people dreamed, with all the
passion of her splendid youth, of the man to whom
Rezanov |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe: of the chime die away--they have endured but an instant--and a
light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And
now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and
fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many tinted windows
through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber
which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the
maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows
a ruddier light through the blood-coloured panes; and the blackness
of the sable drapery appals; and to him whose foot falls upon the
sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled
peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe: pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and
especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which
shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men.
And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease,
were the incidents of half an hour.
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.
When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his
presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the
knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep
seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive
and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: plays a great part in all island tales and customs; and among other
functions, some of them more awful, she regulates the season of
good fish. With Venus in one phase, as we had her, certain fish
were poisonous in the lagoon: with Venus in another, the same fish
was harmless and a valued article of diet. White men explain these
changes by the phases of the coral.
It adds a last touch of horror to the thought of this precarious
annular gangway in the sea, that even what there is of it is not of
honest rock, but organic, part alive, part putrescent; even the
clean sea and the bright fish about it poisoned, the most stubborn
boulder burrowed in by worms, the lightest dust venomous as an
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